Cinderella – Teatro alla Scala

When the curtain at La Scala opens on the new Cinderella inaugurating the Ballet Season, the audience enters a world where technology becomes poetry and light tells stories. OOOPStudio has created for this production a visual universe that transforms the stage into a space of continuous metamorphosis, where video scenography and mapping construct the emotional geography of Perrault’s fairy tale through Prokofiev’s music.

The scenic structure – lateral towers, deep frames, sculptural architectures – becomes a receptive surface for projections that continuously rewrite the space. The domestic fireplace, place of ash and humiliation, emerges with flames that pulse with almost tangible warmth. Not an illustration, but a presence that visually heats the stage, making the intimacy of the hearth credible through the paradox of technology.

The Fairies of the seasons – central creatures in Prokofiev’s ballet – find their natural language in light. Winter materializes in crystalline tracings like frost on glass, Autumn explodes in branches laden with leaves red as embers, Spring announces itself with efflorescences that seem to draw themselves in real time. Each season is not described but evoked, through essential signs that the music amplifies.

The ballroom palace is an oneiric space where projections multiply arcades and decorated ceilings, where windows shift from golden to nocturnal blue following the rhythm of the party and the approach of midnight. The light does not imitate reality: it declares its own nature as image, as visual construction, as technological poetry.

“Without place and without time, but in all places and in all times”: this programmatic declaration finds in OOOPStudio’s video scenography its most complete realization. Abstraction is not coldness, but the ability to suggest the essential. The projected textures have pictorial, almost impressionistic quality: brushstrokes of light, atmospheric suggestions that create fascinating tension with the defined bodies of the dancers.

The scenography breathes with the dancers, responds to Prokofiev’s episodic music with atmospheric changes that follow the narrative flow. Each scene has its own visual identity, but everything is held together by aesthetic coherence that runs through the entire performance.

This Cinderella demonstrates how technology, when guided by poetic sensibility, does not distract from dance but amplifies it, creating that space “evocative but not abstract, figurative but not didactic” where the fairy tale can breathe and be reborn for contemporary audiences.